"WHAT ARE THEY WRITING ABOUT US BLACKS?" ROMA AND "RACE" IN RUSSIA.
Alaina Lemon
University of Michigan
What does it mean to be "black" (chernyi) in Russia?
Here I will not attempt a history or genealogy of Russian
ideas about blackness; instead, I analyze Romani accounts
that reveal various ways "blackness" can be constructed in
Russia. This essay turns upon Romani (Gypsy)1 accounts
of social interactions with Russians in which being
"black" was an issue. Roma, besides themselves
subscribing to and negotiating within many of the
prevalent categories, also reverse the valence of blackness
or make shifting alignments with other groups also
defined as "black."
looking at us in a hostile way. He replied, "because you
are white and I am black." His wife later denied that this
was the reason, stating that categories of race or racism
did not apply in the Soviet Union: "Racism is something
you have in America." This was several years after
glasnost had begun, but the Soviet press for so long had
depicted the evil colonial forces of capitalist countries and
commonwealths as racist, it was still difficult to deal with
the issue at home. Four years later, another Russian
scholar told me that the term "race" imposed a foreign
category upon Russian social life. It is not my intent to
transpose histories of slavery and repression on the
American continents to Eurasia but to untangle how signs
of "blood," "blackness," are used in Russia in specific
ways to explain behavior, culture, and social position as
biologically determined. Even relations of exchange thus
become a matter of race.
A "black" complexion marks "race" in Russia in the sense
that it externally marks biologically essentialized
identities. What complicates matters for racial purists is
that color can not always serve as a criteria of boundaries
crucial to them: not all Roma, for instance, are actually
very dark. "Blackness," as many writers have already
argued,2 is constructed culturally. The lines of race, with
"blackness" as its cipher, are drawn with reference to
many standards, cultural concerns, and political agendas.3
Russian poetic and dramatic imagery fixates on the
blackness of Gypsy heroines and heroes. One of the most
popular of "Gypsy songs" is titled "Black eyes" (Ochi
Chiornie).7 The song was written by a Russian but
became associated with Gypsies through performance.
Many Romani performers are careful to point out that it is
not a "real Romani song" but one meant for Russians, for
the stage, although they all know the song and may be
proud of their own rendition of it. But in public culture,
the song stands for "Gypsies."
In Russia, a "black" is, among other meanings, a person
whom many North Americans probably would describe as
"ethniclooking" people with "olive" skin and dark eyes
and hair.4 However, in Russia as in many other places,
"race" also is linked to categories that can be connected
via tropes of generation or "blood" and thus mobilized in
political arguments, as in this recent issue of one of the
many nationalist newspapers in the capital: "The highest
goal of the government must be to preserve that racial
nucleus which alone can create culture, beauty and all the
highest values."5 The Russian words natsiya ("nation"
and "nationality") and natsionalnost' ("nationality" or
"ethnicity") indeed often substitute for "race."6 These
concerns with race and nation also often are layered with
economic and moral statements about the poverty of the
Russian people, who are said to inhabit a vast country rich
in natural resources but tapped by foreigners.
Although many romanticize and eroticize the hypnotic
black gaze, in other moments they implicate it as sinister.
"Do you know what dark eyes mean?" said a Russian
trying to dissuade me from talking to Gypsies, "Such
people have sway over others they have more e.s.p.
(extrasens)." In an extension of this allusion to Gypsy
power, another Russian said of more mundane, economic
"crimes" that "Gypsies can make you hand over money
without even realizing it it's like they hypnotize you."
Besides the visible signs of "race" complexion, eyes,
even clothing, as we see below there are less visible
natsional'nie cherty ("national traits") which are said to
lie v krovi ("in the blood"). Russians say of Gypsies that
"trading is in their blood," "stealing horses is in their
The issue of "blackness" first emerged as significant to
my research in 1990. I had been riding the Moscow metro
with a Romani man, the husband of a Romani
ethnographer, and had asked him why people were
34
blood," "metal working "(or "metal" itself) is "in their
blood."8 "Artistic talent," especially dancing, also is said
to lie "in the blood," passed along through the
generations. Even communistera Gypsy films and stage
productions assert this: in the Moscow Romani Theater
adaptation of Kalinin's novel, Gypsy, a Gypsy World War
II hero, Budulei, searches for his family after the war. He
stays at a collective farm and meets a boy who turns out
to be his son. The boy's adoptive mother conceals his
"true" identity and claims that a Tatar grandfather gave
him his "swarthy face." Yet he reveals his blood when he
learns "Gypsy dance" from visiting Gypsy youths he
picks up the steps instantly, "instinctively." His father
thereby recognizes his own "blood" just as immediately.
The proof was in the performance, the irony here being
that Russians usually consider Romani performers less
genuinely Gypsy than "wild" metal workers or travelers.
and performing Roma in Moscow. The children had been
assigned to draw "a Gypsy girl." At the end of the lesson,
the teacher picked up two sample pictures, one of a girl
with a light face, the other dark, and asked the children
which was better, then explaining: "Of course the dark
one [is better]. Again why? Because here we have a clear
image ..." The Romani children, themselves of varying
complexions, did not all automatically draw darkfaced
Gypsy girls. Note that, in this case, darkness was not
necessarily negative; as I hope will be clear, there is room
for ambivalence, especially among Roma.
Applause for inherited talent and other positive valuations
of blackness may not compensate, however, for the
problems of actually being seen by Russians as "black" in
daily life. Other Roma, especially those who are not
performers, are more cynical about the meaning of "being
black." A Keldelari10 welder noted that, once Russians
identify a person as "black," they expect a whole array of
transgressions, especially economic crimes:
Many Roma in Russia, whether they are professional
performers or not, have profoundly internalized that dance
talent and musicality, the dances themselves, are
"inherited." This seems selfevident because children of
famous singers follow their parents into the profession,
and ensembles are often familybased. Through the proof
of performance, and reference to that wellknown "Gypsy
song," one urban Romani performer was able to escape
misplaced antiSemitism:
All Russians care about is whether you're black or white.
And if you're black you are obviously a speculator. Say I
go in and I need to buy a lot of linoleum (He points to the
new house he is building, and then at the ruined linoleum
of the floor of his current house), say I need 30 sheets!
They look at me and think for sure I'm just going to resell
it, maybe they don't even give it to me.
Discrimination there isn't any of that. Haven't I told you
yet how it saved me that I am a Gypsy? I am on the bus,
and a drunk, a Russian was hovering near me. He said,
"Huh, here! Kikes! Jews! We should just kill them all!"
and he came up closer he held his hand over me. And I
look at him and I say, [she illustrates with a shoulder
shimmy] "I'm a Gypsy!" He fell on his knees then and
started to sing the song, "Black eyes..." and I answered
him "Passionate eyes..." and the bus stopped, and I ran
away!
"We are blacks," he also told me, stressing that "we are
treated like second class here, like your Blacks in
America." This phrasing may be considered the
"importation" of a "foreign" category, but this man's way
of describing his experience does not negate its reality to
him.
Younger Roma display a fascination with the music and
dress of American "Blacks" on MTV that rivals their
fascination with Russians. Those of wealthier, merchant
Lovari 11 families, especially, trace their identification
with American Blacks not in terms of defeat or secondclassness, as did the Keldelari metalworker, but in terms
of an "attitude" that they say they can detect in
expressions and movements of American musicians that
renders them "like us." They also equate blackness with
America (as in, "the statue of liberty isn't that where
Michael Jackson dances in the video?") and see America
as "better then Russia." Thus they reverse the valence of
blackness and shift their own place in racial hierarchies:
In this telling, she denied "discrimination," the social
asymmetries entailed by being black: having "black eyes"
was useful, as long as she was not mistaken for another
kind of nonRussian.
Roma in Russia also speak of blackness as among the
criteria of a "true Gypsy." While they may emphasize that
"we also have people with green eyes or pale skin," some
tease such Roma, calling them Gazhe (nonRoma).9 The
blackness category is learned and was overtly taught in a
Romani Sundayschool for children of urban, intellectual,
35
Roma, if more like American blacks, and thus more like
Americans, must be better than Russians.
derogatory shades from phrases such as zhidskaia morda,
or tsyganskaia morda ("Kike mug," "Gypsy mug" ).14 At
any rate, nationalist Russians cited, as representative of
this "invasion," the lines of peddlers with goods spread on
card tables in the park next to the first Moscow
MacDonald's, across from Pushkin's monument.
Forgetting stories about Pushkin's African grandparent (as
well as his poems romanticizing the Caucasus and
Gypsies), they described the hawkers as "desecrating" this
emblem of the Russian nation.15 These hawkers were
Georgian, Armenian, Romani, and other nonRussian
traders who long had been prominent at the semiofficial
and illegal markets. By 1991, the Caucasian contingent
had expanded their trade to include foreign cigarettes,
liquor, cosmetics and clothing, and now seemed to sell on
every street and in every metro station. Certainly Russians
were just as active in informal trade. However, they had
more access to the newly formed commodity exchanges
in the capital and were better positioned to take over
official stores and set up joint ventures. NonRussian nonMuscovites, however, had nowhere to set up shop but in
the streets and kiosks lining them, and thus they also were
more visible.16 That winter, the Russian press seized
upon an incident involving two Armenians and an Azeri
taxi driver. In a dispute over fares, the Azeri driver was
killed. The articles reinforced Russian constructions of
hottempered and violent Caucasians embroiled in endless
feuds among "clans." These images substituted for real
analysis or recognition of nonRussian demands for
linguistic autonomy or statehood, which were in any case
resented in association with the breakup of the former
Soviet empire. Histories and cultures were submerged in
popular discourses linking "blood" with trade and
criminality.
Most Russians do not share this positive equation between
Roma and America that Roma create via "blackness." In
an elevated mood, a Russian might agree that Roma are
"like American Negri"12 for their ability to "musically
improvise." In daily life, however, blackness is a category
loaded with suspicion, and Gypsies are but another
example of clannish "blacks" who inhabit the markets and
survive by "shady deals." "Black" is thus a shade of
economic activity: a "black" can be one who participates
in the "black market."
It is probably commonplace to draw a connection between
ethnic paranoias and images of exchange. However, in an
article tellingly titled, "Gypsies Wander in Volvos: their
Way of Life as a Mirror to Our Economy," the following
citation from a Russian newspaper illustrates how such
paranoia unfolds in Russia in connection with Gypsies:
Mikhail Sergeevich [Gorbachev] made perhaps the
greatest gift to the Gypsy people with his antialcohol
legislation. Crowds of the thirsty in every city and
backwood were drawn to their Gypsy brothers: in
Moscow, for instance, to the train stations, in
Maloiaroslav, to the railroad bridge. Here you could buy
from these possessors of black eyes your favorite
forbidden drink at any time of the day or night. If you
will, this was when the capital of several families crawled
into the first million ...13
To make a more general and graphic connection between
images of exchange and racial outsiders in Russia, I draw
upon a vignette from the early winter of 1991. Despite the
talk of "democratic" and "free market" reforms, food was
more scarce than the year before; even bread was hard to
find. Older Muscovites who remembered the material
hardships of the Second World War said, "Now times are
as bad as during the blockade, as bad as during the war,"
and others described contemporary Moscow with tropes
of war: "Moscow has been invaded; Russia is being taken
over." Some meant music videos in English and foreign
businessmen. However, more upsetting to many was an
"invasion" by litsa kavkazkogo natsional'nosti ("people of
Caucasian nationality" and, more colloquially,
"Southerners" or "Blacks").
For some months after this incident, Russian cabdrivers
refused to pick up people who looked like "southerners."
In Russia, as in many other places, race is constructed
culturally in a way that overlaps it with other categories of
social life, and the visible signs of race and kind can be
other than complexion. "Blacks" also can be marked by
style, by a certain kind of dress. In that year, traders and
the new rich preferred silks and rayons cut into baggy
pants or long slim skirts; such clothes, especially if worn
with gold jewelry or teeth, also marked a person as
"black" in both the market and racial sense of the term.
Because some Roma, especially Lovari, in addition to
being "swarthy" do not dress in the fashion of Gypsies in
films but in these same rayons and silks, Russians
"Litsa" translates literally as "faces" and also means
"individuals." Litso (sing.), however, easily takes on
36
confused them with Armenians or Georgians. Thus the
taxidrivers would not pick up Roma either.
Roma in this case began with the social fact that they
were misrecognized. When the Romani youth claimed to
be Georgian after convincing the driver that they were
Gypsies, he was making a play on Gypsy identity as nonRoma imagine it, taking revenge on Russians who did not
recognize Romaniness as any different from
Georgianness.
In the weeks after the original taxi incident, a teenage girl
from a welltodo merchant Lovari Romani family
recounted the following:
... Since the Azeri thing, taxi drivers don't want to take
blacks. You can stand for an hour, and no one will stop. If
you dress well not like Russians it means you are black.
Once me and my cousins were going home at midnight.
We finally got a car used our best Gypsy accent, "We are
Gypsies!" ("My Tsygane!") and reassured him, "Gypsies
always pay!" It was boring in the cab, so our brothers
started joking, "You stupid Russian we're really
Georgians, we're fooling you!" "Get out of my cab!" He
left us right there, and we stood for an hour! Those girls
cursed their brothers!
At the same time, Roma also do identify with other
"blacks," both in irony and in earnest. What then does it
mean to be "black" among other blacks? This is how the
Lovari girl continued her narrative:
Once we couldn't get a cab at all, so we took the metro.
We saw how all the Gazhe (Russians, nonRoma) were
reading, and my cousin started saying, "What are they
writing? What are they writing?" They thought he was
crazy. All the other black people, Armenians and such,
were smiling; they knew. "What are they writing about us
Blacks, eh?" One old lady said, "They are writing that we
need to kill you all, that you are robbing us, and we are
becoming poor." Then another Black said, "We should
kill you." My brother laughed and he said, "No, no, you
don't have to kill her this is a good, fat, Russian woman."
We laughed so hard, we had to get off the train there!
To avoid being mistaken for the wrong kind of "blacks,"
they had to "pass" as a version of themselves.
Gypsies are described with great regularity as
quintessential "tricksters," as always masquerading and
disappearing. However, Roma do not alter their outward
identities because they have a peculiar cultural tradition
for doing so. Pragmatic shifting or masking is possible,
even sometimes required, because blackness is itself
already a "shifter."17
"What are they writing about us blacks?" The question
less requested information than it referred to, indexed, the
asymmetry of a relationship to the majority that was
shared by "us blacks" at that time. That is, speaking of
being shut out by print was a way of expressing how all
the blacks on the train at that moment experienced a nonimagined anticommunity as nonRussians. This is of
course a pun upon Anderson's formulation of imagined
communities (1983), only here denizens of the nationstate
were watching the progress of print from the margins.
"Blackness" is a slippery category. It is inescapable
because supposedly unchanging features mark it, but it
also is indefinite, both because it umbrellas so many
"kinds," whose actual members may be aware of other
distinctions, and because the meaning of "blackness"
overlaps changing moral, market, and national identities
and thus its definition changes with them. Blackness also
is first constructed as "they" (in line with say, national
interests), and after that becomes a possible "we" and may
become a powerful, if momentary, focus of weness.
This exclusion was not because these Roma could not
read what was written about them contrary to stereotypes
of the illiterate Gypsy, many Roma in Russia can read,
and certainly many younger people of the Lovari groups
can read not only Russian, but English. The point is more
about the control of language, control of infrastructure,
and exclusion from networks of bureaucracy, including
print media. As another instance of language as exclusive,
and thus constituting "kinds": after the Lovari girl had
told me about the taxi drivers, I recounted that a Russian
woman had seen me bargaining in the market with a
Georgian. She had heard both of our accents and rolled
her eyes, saying, "They understand each other!" This
Many have argued that Roma are adept at "masking" in
Goffman's sense, with the qualification that because they
are marginal they must do so. Certainly the Lovari
teenagers found themselves, for once, less despised than
another minority, and it was to their advantage to portray
themselves not as Caucasians but as Gypsies. However,
what alternative is there to "masking," survival or no
survival, when the majority population can never seem to
get one's identity "straight" in the first place?18 The
37
story made her laugh heartily, "Yes, you are like us a
foreigner here too..." Language here is a marker of
common exclusion, as being written about was
emblematic of other exclusions, in politics, in the market,
on public transport.
"Gypsy" when the speaker is a Russian or is a Romani
person speaking in the above senses. I use "Roma" when
the speaker is Romani or when I am narrating. I hope this
way both to keep the analysis clear and to give a sense of
the shading of stereotype in discourse. This is not to say
that Roma never sincerely use the term "Gypsy" to refer
to themselves. However, it is clearer not to use the words
haphazardly, as if Roma made no distinction between
them, even if that distinction may idealize oppositions of
"true" vs. "ersatz" Roma, a debate over which there is no
space to describe here.
Take then as well the Rom who is said to have written his
"name" down in his Russian passport as "Melalo Kalo"
which translates into Romani as "Dirty Black." This joke
had a double, disemic19 twist: the Roma could name
himself as stereotypically "black," but in a language that
no Russian bureaucrat could understand. At the same
time, we have seen that Roma do think of themselves as
black but not in the way that one might expect. Such
irony, expressed in the control of language, is fiercely
engaged, not detached: it is a statement about being
bound, because of another's nonrecognition, to the
anonymity of the being "black."
2. See, for instance, Hall, 1992: "What this [cultural
construction of race] brings into play is the recognition of
the immense diversity and differentiation of the historical
and cultural experiences of black subjects" (p. 254). Hall
here is concerned also with the politics and "relations of
representation," taking part in an ongoing debate that in
its wider trajectory has of course influenced the shape of
this paper, although I am not able here to fully engage
cultural studies or critical theory.
Textnotes
Research in Russia for this essay in 19901993 was
supported by a graduate training fellowship from the
Joint Committee on Soviet Studies of the SSRC (funded by
the Soviet and East European Research and Training Act
of 1983, title VIII); by a grant from IREX, with funds
provided by the national Endowment for the Humanities,
USIA, and the U.S. Department of State, which
administers the Russian, Eurasian and East European
Research Program (title VIII); and by a U.S. Department
of Education FulbrightHayes Doctoral Dissertation
Research Abroad Fellowship.
3. On ways criteria of racial boundaries align with
national ideologies and notions of class (along with moral
reputability and gender) see, for instance, Ann Stoler,
1992; Joel Strieker, 1995.
4. The terms temnyi ("dark") and smuglyi ("swarthy") may
substitute as descriptors, and it may be that chernyi,
("black") only recently has become a common term
describing complexion. However, rather than isolate it as
a crucial keyterm, I use it only to begin to discuss its
meaning in a social system in which some people
experience a color bar.
Versions of this essay were presented at the Fifth Annual
Symposium on Soviet and PostSoviet Cultural Studies,
1995, Columbia University, NYC, and at the Spring
Meeting of the American Ethnological Society, 1994,
Santa Monica. For this revised version (which is still
under repair [na remont]), I am grateful to the
participants of the 1995 SSRC summer workshop in
anthropology and sociology of the Former Soviet States
and also to Paul Friedrich, Alicia Gamez, Hugh
Gusterson, Michael Herzfeld, Stephanie Platz, Dan Segal,
Michael Silverstein, and Miklos Voros.
5. Shturmovik, 1995, (p.2).
6. As it did in another statement in the same issue from
the Russian National Union (p.1): "... there are even
people who ... rush to mix with the Jewish natsia and
expect all kinds of beneficial results ... a man and wife
who are both Russian and happen to want healthy, racially
whole children are automatically labeled fascists ..."
Certainly this is only a faction among Russians, but I have
heard intellectuals and nonextremists express similar
ideas about Stalin's decimation of the Russian nation and
the need to rehabilitate the genepool with the best of
Russian intellect.
1. Roma sometimes use names such as "Gypsies" or
"Tsygane" (Russian), even among themselves. The Roma
I know usually use such terms either ironically or else to
cater to nonRomani listeners who do not know the
Romani term. I try to preserve this sense here by using
38
7. The song is about dangerous, sensual magnetism,
romantic and exotic: "Black eyes, passionate eyes,
burning and magnificent eyes, how I fear you, how I love
you ..."
18. Humphrey (1993) describes Russians who
misrecognize Tajik and other refugees at train stations,
telling her that they were "Gypsies."
8. These are not metaphors for the ingrainedness of a long
habit. This is clear in the way one Russian judge in an
interview transposed the popular notion of blood into a
scientific register: "... It's in their genes ... Do they
understand their place in society? God found them useful,
so they have a right to live. But their life is difficult ... and
their genes make them unable to work."
9. One Romani girl in Moscow with auburn hair dyed it
black, while the mother of another with blond hair was
constantly explaining that the girl was indeed "truly
Romani."
19. Of course, Romani "selfknowledge" of themselves as
"Roma" and as "Gypsies" is just as constructed and
disputed as anything outsiders believe they see of
"Gypsies." The point is that while selfknowledge is not
necessarily more true, it is supposed to be "known only by
us about us," and that thus stereotypes that can be
deployed in various, and sometimes ambivalent, ways.
See Herzfeld (1987) on disemia and the doubleedged and
ambivalent possibilities of identity in Greece.
References:
Anderson, Benedict
1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
10. There are at least ten different "dialect groups" or
"nations" of Roma in Russia. Space prevents me from
describing them or their relations here, which I address in
other papers. Keldelari are among the Vlachspeaking
Romani groups.
Hall, Stuart
1992. "New Ethnicities" in "Race," Culture and
Difference. James Donald and Ali Rattansi, eds. Sage
Publications, pp. 252259.
11. Another Vlach Romani nation.
Herzfeld, Michael
1987. Anthropology through the Looking Glass: Critical
Ethnography in the Margins of Europe. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
12. This is not necessarily a derogatory term.
13. Rossiskaya Gazeta, 2 June, 1995.
14. Litso is the term for human faces, morda for animal.
Humphrey, Caroline
1993. "MythMaking, Narratives and the Dispossessed in
Russia." A Lecture presented at the SAE section of the
1993 Meeting of the AAA in Washington, D.C.
15. See issues of Den' in 1992 and 1993, for some of the
more virulent public attacks on "blacks" and
"speculators."
Rossiskaya Gazeta. Shturmovik.
16. Moreover, they had no residence permits, and thus no
vizitki, the identification cards shoppers had to show to
cashiers in state shops. The card was intended to limit the
purchase of shortage goods to registered Muscovites.
Cashiers often asked those with darker skin to show these
cards, while they would hand a paler "Russian" her
receipt straight away.
Silverstein, Michael
1976. "Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural
description," in Meaning in Anthropology, eds. K. Basso
and H. Selby Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press. pp. 1155.
Stoler, Ann
1991. "Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power," in
Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist
Anthropology in the Post Modern Era. Michaela Di
Leonardo, ed. Berkeley: University of California Press,
pp. 51 101.
17. Not unlike the way deictic terms such as "here,"
"there," and "we" do not stand for some definite object
but shift reference, depending on the speaker. See
Silverstein (1976).
39
Streiker, Joel
"Policing Boundaries: Race, Class, and Gender in
Cartagena, Columbia." in American Ethnologist, vol.22/1:
5474.
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